New ideas about Pluto, Charon, and all the little moons have been flowing back from the New Horizons spacecraft fast and furious. If you’re curious but haven’t kept up, here’s everything we’ve learned so far.

The New Horizons spacecraft is on a decade-long mission exploring deep space. It just completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto, a dwarf planet and the first Kuiper Belt Object ever explored. The spacecraft can either make observations or communicate with Earth, so for now it’s focusing on getting more data and sending back just the barest, highest-priority data in its failsafe downlinks. Even that tiny trickle of data has been enough to completely overthrow our theories of what we expected to find at the icy little world and its family of moons.

We got our first surprise when Charon was still a fuzzy blur in the distance: the massive moon had a smeared dark polar cap. Now named Mordor, the cap is still provoking more questions than answers. We know it’s big and red; that’s about it. We’ll know more later when we start getting spectra back to tell us about chemical composition on the surface of the moon.

While they don’t necessarily look impressive in their current pixellated glory, once we get the lossless downloads without compression artifacts researchers will manage to pry out all sorts of secrets from these tiny moons.

The probe also captured photographs of the diminutive Styx and Kerbeos, but they won’t be downlinked for a while. The specks of moons will only be about twenty pixels, but that’s still an impressive improvement over what we have now.

New Horizons Spacecraft and Mission Timeline

Mission Operations Center the day of the Pluto Flyby on July 14, 2015. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The spacecraft has been performing excellently. It was right on target during the approach, hitting a trajectory well-within both the targeted and ideal ranges. It had one heart-stopping hiccup when an error on July 4th sent it into safe mode. The team heroically worked around a 9-hour ping time to get the problem resolved and the probe was back online after missing only three of its scheduled (non-essential) photographs.

You can track which space explorers the Deep Space Network is chatting with in real time on the NASA Eyes website.. Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

New Horizons is in departure phase, balancing collecting more observations with downlinking the most critical mission data. The data I’m looking forward to are high resolution stereopairs of Pluto’s terrain (allowing us to see relief in three dimensions), Nix in colour, a higher resolution look at Hydra, more spectra on chemical composition, and temperature measurements. We’re also still collecting data on the space around Pluto, checking out dust distribution, checking for traces of escaped atmosphere, and watching how high energy particles and plasmas interact with the miniature system. Beyond that, I’m sure we’ll be getting all sorts of surprises we haven’t even thought of yet. We’ll be getting data from New Horizons for 16 months , but the last of NASA’s prescheduled press conferences is on Monday so the deluge of new ideas will take a brief hiatus soon.

As for the spacecraft: New Horizons can make a second Kuiper Belt flyby and explore deep space, but only if the extended mission is approved for after 2016.

This imaginary artwork shows the close-up beauty of both Jupiter and Venus, two bright naked-eye planets that will be visible close together in the skies this week. ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

By Andrew Fazekas, National Geographic PUBLISHED JUNE 29, 2015

If you spot clear skies any evening this week, don’t miss your chance to witness a stunning close encounter of the two brightest star-like objects in the sky.

Venus and Jupiter—both dazzling star-like objects—will appear to huddle close together in the sunset skies this week. This will be the planets' nearest approach in over a decade.

Both worlds have been slowly converging over the past several weeks, and on Tuesday, June 30, and Wednesday, July 1, they will reach their tightest grouping, separated by less than half a degree. That’s less than the width of the disk of the full moon. So close that onlookers will be able to cover both planets with just their pinky held at arm’s length.

Astronomers call these celestial meetups conjunctions. And this is the second in a series of three between Venus and Jupiter in over a year. The cosmic duo were a bit tighter on August 18, 2014, and will be a tad farther apart in their next encounter at dawn on October 26.

Even though conjunctions aren't that rare, this series is the best between these planets in about 15 years. If you miss the remaining conjunctions, you'll get another chance next year on August 27.

This skychart shows the view of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction on July 1, 2015 and what the pretty pair will look like through backyard telescopes. ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

While limited in their scientific interest, historically Venus and Jupiter conjunctions may be a possible answer to the Star of Bethlehem legend. In the years 2 and 3 B.C. there was a similar series of three stunningly close pairings between the planets that would have caught the eye of ancient astronomers.

Today, the best bet to catch sight of the pretty pairing is to look westward and high the sky beginning a half hour after local sunset. As darkness falls, beacon-like Venus will make its appearance first. Both planets shine so brilliantly, however that observers should have no problem spotting them at dusk. Some novice skywatchers may even mistake them for oncoming lights of airplanes.

Venus will appear about 6 times brighter than Jupiter even though it's only a tenth the size. That’s because Venus is eternally enshrouded with highly reflective white clouds and is much closer to Earth. It's about 56 million miles (90 million kilometers) away while Jupiter is much more distant—some 550 million miles (890 million kilometers). So their apparent proximity to each other is just an optical illusion.

With even the smallest of backyard telescopes, you will be able to spot Venus’s disk, which resembles a miniature version of a quarter moon. With Jupiter, high magnification will showcase its dark cloud belts and four of its largest moons, sitting beside the planet like a row of ducks.

After July 1st, both planets will appear to quickly separate and sink closer to the horizon. They'll be lost in the glare of the sunset by the end of the month. Both will reappear in late August as bright morning stars visible before dawn.

But before that, Venus and Jupiter will offer one last opportunity for an amazing photo at dusk. As a grand finale, the planets will be joined by the razor-thin crescent moon on July 18th. The tight celestial grouping will span no more than 4 degrees—less than the width of the three middle fingers held at arm's length.

Here’s a perfect chance to catch the three brightest nighttime celestial objects huddled together, all in the same field of view of your binoculars.

Clear Skies!

This simulated orbital view of the solar system shows the relative positions of Venus and Jupiter and why both planets appear close together for observers located on Earth. ILLUSTRATION BY A.FAZEKAS, SKYSAFARI

We have a nice team of Admins and lots of people who post lots of interesting stuff. This is really the best group I've seen for space and similarly themed content here on dA. A nice mixture of things.